A 15 year old Moroccan teenager, Amina Filali was raped and subsequently forced to marry her rapist, despairing of justice Filali committed suicide.

Rape victims being forced to marry their rapists is an ancient practice that existed in many cultures throughout history, and is a real problem all over the world today, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

What compounded the crime was that not only was Filali forced to marry her rapist but Moroccan law was not on her side. The legal system in Morocco integrated this abhorrent cultural phenomenon in the 1950′s.

Islamophobes were quick at the time to misattribute the practice to Islam. For instance hate-monger Robert Spencer wrote:

This is done because the focus in Islam is not on the rape at all, but on the shame the woman has brought to her family by her sexual immorality, even if she was forced. That shame is erased if the rapist marries her.

These were just two of the most prominent Islamophobes commenting on Filali’s death, hundreds of hate-blogs and sites in the Islamophobic looniverse echoed such commentary, sprinkling in their own anti-Muslim spin.

The misattribution of such cases and issues to Sharia’ and Islam is of course part of the well-worn demonization war that Spencer, Geller and their cohorts have been waging for years now. Facts are unimportant in this war, any crime or heinous action committed by a Muslim must be assigned to Islam goes their thinking. Lying to prove their point is not an impediment.

What they and their drone like blind followers will conveniently overlook for instance is that,

“…in 12 Latin American countries…rapist can be exonerated if he offers to marry the victim and she accepts…In Costa Rica, he can be exonerated even if she refuses his offer…” (UNICEF)

The majority of these nations are Catholic Christian, are we then going to blame Christianity for these laws?

If one wished to play a tit for tat it could easily be pointed out to the Islamophobes that it is in fact the Bible which commands a raped woman to marry her rapist, not the Qur’an,

“If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.” (Deuteronomy 22: 28-29)

Sadly, what is obfuscated and lost when the hate-mongers resort to racist tropes and Orientalist misattributions are the intrepid activists, the Muslim and Arab feminists who are fighting to change laws that can lead to such tragic results in their countries: